In its short history, Internet usage has been mainly driven by portals and search engines, such as Yahoo! and Google. Recently, the rapid growth of social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, has revealed a new trend of Internet usage. Social networking generally relates to services and tools that help users maintain and expand their circles of friends usually by exploiting existing relationships. Social networking sites have shown potential to become the places on the Internet where many people spend most of their time, thus making these sites the main entry point for online activity. Often times, these social networking sites can become the focal point of sharing information, such as links, multimedia, music, and the like.
In general, social networking sites and other online services of the Internet offer a mix of features and tools, such as message boards, games, journals or web logs (“blogs”). One of the main features utilized by social network sites is file transfers and downloads.
File transfers in a network computer system is a well-known concept. For example, in the early days of the Internet, file transfers were accomplished by connecting to a destination computer and executing a file transfer command (e.g. FTP). This type of data transfer can be referred to as a client-server model.
The client-server model of data transfer has disadvantages and faults. For example, if several servers store copies, i.e., mirrors, of a file, these servers can be rapidly overwhelmed in response to a spike of popularity of the file. Accordingly, the user experience in obtaining these files may be less than satisfactory.